


Une chanson de l'Opéra

by Skoll



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Azazel doesn't like idiots, Charles really can't speak French, Dancing, M/M, Paris (City), Phantom of the Opera - Freeform, Pining, Raven is the best kind of diva, Somehow not crack I promise, Why do I do this to myself
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-08
Updated: 2013-01-08
Packaged: 2017-11-09 11:12:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/454803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skoll/pseuds/Skoll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“There's no such thing as the phantom of the opera.” - In which the year is 1896, and Charles is a dancer in the Paris Opera House with a mysterious admirer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, this is an X-men/Phantom of the Opera crossover. No, I cannot explain why my muse suddenly insisted this be written. That said, I hope you enjoy.

Slowly, the Opera begins to empty.

Charles sits at the edge of the stage and waits, rotating one ankle in an attempt to work out some of the tension in it. It was a long rehearsal—not that there is such a thing as a short rehearsal, this close to a show—and Charles' muscles are humming with the effort of it. He feels sweaty, tired, and wonderfully alive; he has no doubt he's smiling far too widely.

The younger dancers leave in one large mass, headed for the crowded rooms at the back of the building that are offered for those who cannot find apartments of their own. They giggle as they pass him, and one or two of the bolder ones call out hellos. Charles just turns his smile on them and waves, setting off another round of laughter. 

“Breaking hearts again, Charles?” Raven asks, dropping down next to him. He turns to her and watches as her skin ripples—the heart-shaped face, blonde hair and heavy stage make-up of her role disappear into her usual blue form, and the flowing layers of her dress shift into something lighter and more comfortable. Her mutation makes his sister practically revered by the make-up and costume designers; it takes no effort to have Raven ready for a show, something that cannot be said of most divas.

“Just being friendly,” Charles says, not putting much effort into the protest. He'd never sleep with any of the dancers, and they know it—more to the point, Raven knows it, and would never claim otherwise except to tease. “You sounded lovely today.”

“And your dancing was amazing,” Raven says. “We're just too fantastic for our own good, sometimes.” She smiles at him, and bumps their shoulders together.

“And so modest, too,” Angel throws over her shoulder as she passes them, heading for the stairs that lead down from the stage. There's laughter in her voice, and her thoughts are light; she's accustomed to Raven and Charles, having danced opposite Charles for nearly three years now. “Staying behind to practice again, Professor?” 

Charles winces just slightly at the nickname, but says, “Yes.” The show is in less than a week, and there's still a large part of one act where Charles' footwork tends to get sloppy. He's never denied the fact that he's something of a perfectionist.

“Watch out the phantom doesn't get you!” she calls out, darting a mischievous smile at Charles before exiting the stage.

“There's no such thing as the phantom!” Charles calls back. The sound of her laughter filters up the stairs from the area below, but she doesn't answer.

Raven shakes her head in fond disbelief, and pushes herself up to stand. “I'm going to head back to the apartment, if you think you'll be here a while. Please remember to come home for dinner, this time.”

“That was once,” Charles says, somewhat indignantly. He can get a little caught up in his work, but he rarely does so to such a degree that he forgets about meals. Still, Raven is his younger sister—it's her prerogative to hold one mistake over his head for the rest of their lives, or so she claims.

Raven just shakes her head again, and presses a light kiss to the top of his. “Remember,” she says, her tone firm, and then turns to go.

It does not take very long after that until Charles is alone. The rest of the singers and dancers filter away to their own homes, calling out farewells to Charles as they go. When he is the only one left on the stage, Charles flexes his feet against the air and then pulls his legs back onto the stage, coming up to stand. 

The stage of the Paris Opera is an amazing thing when empty. Perhaps it is the intensity of the focus with which most of the company works, or the way emotions run high during a show—whatever causes it, there always seems to be an echo of mental energy on the empty stage, like the stage itself is remembering all the people that earned their living through its grace. That echo isn't especially noticeable when others are there with Charles, the volume of their darting thoughts drowning out any other noise; when he is alone on the stage, however, he feels that echo acutely. It's one of the most welcoming things Charles has ever known.

“Alright,” he says. He faces the empty seats before the stage, the empty boxes lining the mezzanine, and says, “I'm here now. Just me.”

A moment later, he feels it: a sensation like eyes on him, as though someone is watching him unseen. Maybe it's just Charles' imagination acting up, especially with all the recent talk of a phantom in the Opera, but sometimes when he dances he is certain he has some sort of audience. That—well, presence is the best word, Charles supposes—is not intrusive. Almost exactly the opposite, actually, as Charles finds it motivates him to dance all the better. 

It is probably someone who works in the Opera looking in after hours, someone too shy to actually approach Charles and talk to him. Charles keeps hoping whoever it is will come out and assuage Charles' curiosity, but that has yet to happen. If Charles was truly determined to find out who that person was, it would be simple enough—Charles is a telepath, and it is well within his skills to seek out a nearby mind and gather up an identity from those thoughts. He's decided not to, though, choosing to respect the privacy of his audience. Eventually, he trusts, his admirer will come forward and meet him. Until then, Charles is perfectly content to dance for his anonymous audience, and hope that this will be the time he or she decides to speak to him.

“I'm glad you're here,” Charles says, hoping his audience can hear him. He gets no answer, unsurprisingly, but the feeling of being watched redoubles. Charles smiles, and moves to his starting position at the edge of the stage.

He hums the first bar of the act to himself, counting the beats before his entrance, and then it comes, and he is dancing, and the world around him fades entirely from his focus. 

…

“Monsieur?” a voice asks, interrupting Charles' last few steps. For a moment, Charles thinks his admirer has finally decided to talk to him—the thought makes him entirely too enthusiastic, Charles acknowledges, considering he's never talked to that person in his life. Then reality settles in, and Charles realizes that one of the new dancers is standing on stage, watching him.

Charles lowers his arm, his focus dissipating, and says, “Yes?” The dancer blinks at him, clearly not comprehending, and—oh. That was English, not French, Charles realizes. He reaches his mind out to the girl's, borrowing her grasp of the language for his use, and tries again, “Yes?” This time Charles' ears hear 'Oui?', for the split second before his mind makes the translation for him—definitely French, that time.

“So it is true,” the girl says. “You are English.” She clearly is not; her skin is too dark to be native to England or even France, and the wrong shade to come from the Mediterranean. Her French is accented, too, as though it is a second language and not her first. 

“I was born in England, yes,” Charles says, shifting his weight to keep his overtaxed muscles moving. He danced for too long, though thankfully the quality of the light assures him that he has not yet missed dinner—he will be sore tonight, but at least Raven will not be intolerably smug. “My name is Charles. What's yours?”

“Ororo,” the girl says, something a little defiant in her voice. It's obviously not a French name—British East African, her thoughts tell him—and while she's proud of it, it will also have earned her some mockery from the other dancers by now. The Opera House is supposed to be a bastion of tolerance if its reputation is to be believed, and in some cases it truly is. Ororo's mutation, for instance, would never earn her scorn here, any more than Charles' has, or Raven's, or Angel's. Ororo's foreign birth, however, and her clearly foreign name, are an entirely different story. 

“That's a beautiful name,” Charles says, both because it is and because Ororo badly needs to hear it. She looks taken aback for a moment, then positively beams at Charles. “What do you need, Ororo?”

She seems to remember, suddenly, that she interrupted Charles' practice—apology colors her thoughts, and Charles smiles at her quickly to dismiss that emotion. “I heard,” Ororo says, hesitantly, “that you will teach any of the dancers who asks. Is that true?”

“It is,” Charles says. It's what earned him the nickname of “Professor” from the other dancers. Educational opportunities were abundant for Charles until he turned thirteen, at least; most of his fellow dancers have not been so fortunate. It's really the least he can do to help.

“I can read, a little, and write my own name, but that is all,” Ororo says. “Will you help me?”

Charles rolls one shoulder as he considers. “Come to me on the Wednesday after the show,” he says, finally. “You can have your first lesson then, and we can work out the rest of them from there.” Ororo is bright, her thoughts quick; it would be a shame to leave her incapable of seeking other work, should she chose to leave the Opera House. Charles will make time, somehow.

“Thank you.” She says it fervently, almost too much so for what Charles is offering, and then retreats quickly off the stage as though she's afraid Charles will change his mind if she stays. She goes in the direction of the in-house dormitory, not the main street exit—Charles remembers when he was in her situation, living in the Opera with his sister, and saving every coin of his wages to buy an apartment of their own. Those days are passed, thank God; now Charles is the lead male dancer, one of the names on the posters outside the theater, and his life is mostly under his own control.

It isn't until she's gone that Charles realizes the feeling of eyes on him has gone as well. His admirer slipped away rather than speaking to Charles once again. Charles is a little disappointed, yes, but not surprised.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Charles says, this time to no one, and packs up to go home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> French will be used sporadically in this fic. As it is my second language, not my first, I apologize for any errors I might make.
> 
> Edit: Thank you to Freuen for correcting me on my complete lack of knowledge about 1890's geography. I've changed Ororo's home from Kenya to British East Africa to reflect this.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This updating once a day thing is absolutely not going to last. However, for today at least, here I am again, because this story is horribly persistent. Enjoy.

Before Raven had come into his life, Charles had thought he was alone in the world.

Academically, he had known there were others like him—mutants being the most polite word society had to offer for his kind, and so what Charles preferred to call them. He'd seen articles about them in newspapers sometimes, and sometimes he'd hear about mutant revolts and uprisings in the colonies; mutants were present in the world, and there was no denying that. 

Practically, though, Charles might as well have been alone. Being part of polite society in England dictated that mutations were not ever publicly discussed. Sometimes there were rumors of there being a mutant in such and such a family, but those whispers tended to be silenced quickly and efficiently, either by parading about the family member in question to show their humanity, or by sending them away. Generally the excuse was boarding school, if the mutant was young enough, or a stay with foreign relatives if they were too old for schooling. The first time Charles had read a mind was when he was seven—fortunately, that had been old enough that he knew better than to speak about what he could do.

Raven had been a revelation: someone like him, a mutant, but clearly civilized, clearly not monstrous. Raven had been a little girl, afraid and alone and confused—save for the fact that she'd been stealing from his kitchens, she'd actually been better mannered than some of his family's high society friends. He'd felt a sense of kinship with her immediately.

Charles cannot bring himself to regret the way she changed his life. Even knowing now how drastically altered his life is from what he imagined it being as a child, he wouldn't change a thing.

…

When Charles arrives at the Opera the next morning, it's in an uproar. There's usually a certain degree of manic energy that occurs this close to a show's opening night—today there is even more activity than even that would explain. Charles has to dodge two dancers on his way to his dressing room, both of whom barely stop to murmur apologies before they're racing off again.

Angel is waiting for him in his dressing room, when he does finally get there. She's already changed into her dancing wear, and is idly stretching out one leg when he enters. “Hello,” Charles says, dropping one hand lightly on her shoulder along with the greeting. It's a necessity of dancing with one another that Angel and he are physically quite comfortable with each other, and a consequence of working in an opera house his whole life that any modesty Charles once had is gone. He doesn't mind Angel being in his dressing room—that said, it's not exactly a common occurrence either. “It's a little busy out there today, isn't it?”

“Oh, that's just the rumor mill hard at work,” Angel says. Charles pauses in unbuttoning his shirt to give her a quizzical look. “The phantom,” Angel supplies, and Charles just barely manages to keep from rolling his eyes. “Yeah, 'there's no phantom of the opera,' I get it. You say it often enough to get the point across, Prof. Doesn't change the fact that Kitty claims she saw him last night, which of course means that everyone is claiming they've seen him now. There's been fighting over what he actually looks like—you know how the Opera gets.”

Charles does—this is hardly the first time this sort of mass speculation has started up, though it's usually focused on the rich patrons of the Opera rather than ghosts. Kitty, one of the chorus girls who idolizes his sister, has never been hesitant to instigate these sort of things; she's an outgoing girl, who has been becoming progressively more mischievous as she gets further into her teens. “So what are the highlights of the argument?” Charles asks. He still doesn't believe in the phantom, but the collective imaginations of the Opera company do tend to turn out amusing things.

“Oh, some of it's the usual,” Angel says, “tall, cloaked, you know. Most of the disagreement is over his face. He's terribly scarred, or he's got the face of an angel but with no eyes, or he's got no skin at all and he's just a bare skull on a human body. Somebody threw in horns, but I think that was probably just Azazel getting bored.”

“And Kitty's theory?” Charles leans down to lace his shoes, moving by habit rather than by focus.

Angel's lips quirk up. “It's a good one this time. She claims he was a soldier in the wars—isn't getting too specific about which—who came back from war wounded and died here. Says he's still wearing the helmet he wore to war, and he'll bleed forever from the bullet wounds that killed him. The number of shots he took changes too, it's pretty fun to hear.”

It's undignified, but this time Charles can't hold back the urge to roll his eyes. “Has she explained why any wounded soldier would come to the Paris Opera House rather than a hospital?”

“Professor, c'mon, don't ask for logic,” Angel says, laughing. “He's a tortured soul, clearly he's gonna live in an opera house.” 

“And we are quite definitive on the phantom being a 'he', then?”

Angel says, by way of reminder, “Teenaged girls, Charles. Of course the phantom is a guy.” Charles restrains from point out the fact that Angel herself is only nineteen, and not so long ago was one of the giggling mass herself. Her smile turns pointed and a little mockingly lascivious, and she says, “I'm actually giving them about six hours before they start guessing the size of his—”

Charles interrupts her quickly, waving one hand through the air. “Thank you, Angel, really, that image mixed so well with the bleeding bullet wounds.”

“Don't pretend you don't love it,” Angel says, and pushes him gently as he stands.

The door to the room swings open, and Moira MacTaggert pops her head in. “Hey, don't you two start too,” she says, admonishment in her voice, alongside a heavy Scottish accent. Moira is one of the few entirely human members of the Opera House's cast and crew, though that doesn't keep her from ruling the dancers with an iron fist. “I'm getting enough trouble from my younger dancers today, I need you two behaving.”

“We'll be good, Moira,” Charles promises, still smiling.

“Yes, well,” Moira says, shaking her head. She's known Charles for the better part of his adult life, and has seen her fair share of both good and bad behavior from him—his teenaged years were occasionally tiring to everyone around him. “On stage in five minutes, don't be late.” She doesn't say goodbye, just closes the door, no doubt moving on to corral the younger dancers into their places.

“Shall we?” Charles asks, and some part of his upbringing prompts him to present his arm to Angel. She takes it, amusement and slightly edged mockery dancing through her thoughts; Angel is quick to remind people that she is many things, but a lady isn't one of them. From him, she'll tolerate this sort of thing, so long as it happens infrequently. Anyone else would be treated to an example of what Angel learned when she lived on the streets as a child.

“Let's,” Angel says.

…

There is a yellow iris sitting on the small table in Charles' dressing room, when he finally returns to it.

For a long moment, he just blinks at it in complete incomprehension. Between the long rehearsal—admittedly longer for the singers than the dancers, today, but exhausting nevertheless—and Charles' independent practice, the hour is now well into the night. This time he has missed dinner, though at least he forewarned Raven this would be the case and won't have to contend with her over it later. He was sore before he began dancing today, and now has passed beyond that into a state where he will fall asleep as soon as his body touches a flat, horizontal surface. 

In this state, the flower that somehow made its way into his locked dressing room seems like an impossibility. There's no note left with it, no card to indicate where it came from—the only identifying mark on the thing is a thin metal ring around the stem, too small to fit Charles' hand and too small even for most women. Charles has to reach out and touch the petals, fresh and soft under his fingertips, before he can bring himself to accept that the flower even exists.

He picks it up, twirling the stem around his fingers as he thinks. There's a meaning to this flower, Charles knows—learning the language of flowers is not a typical masculine pursuit, and so generally wouldn't have been included in his upbringing, but he picked more than a little of it up from his mother's thoughts and found it interesting enough to learn on his own. It was one more little way Charles didn't precisely fit into the society he was brought up in, but far from the most egregious in society's eyes. 

Irises are eloquent flowers, Charles recalls, with more meanings than the usual. There's—something about honor associated with them, he thinks, or wisdom, it's been a long time since he bothered trying to remember this. The meaning of the color, Charles does remember; it's telling, actually, as yellow irises are associated with passion. It's a gift meant to show interest in his body and his mind, and, more than likely, the first contact Charles has had from his admirer. He finds himself smiling, almost despite himself. It's a thoughtful gift to be given at the end of a long day, even if the meaning would have been lost on almost anyone else.

Idly, he slips the metal ring off the flower and curls his palm around it, setting the flower back on the table. He should get water for his gift, but he's honestly too tired to contemplate doing any such thing. Charles traces one finger around the edge of the metal ring, debating the relative merits of keeping his flower alive versus finally getting some sleep. The ring almost seems to vibrate in his hand at the contact, though Charles knows better than to attribute that to anything but tiredness.

“Thank you,” he says to the empty room, as apparently he's started up a habit of talking to himself now. Then he shakes himself out of his own bizarre mood, and changes back into his street clothes.

The flower he leaves to its own devices—he's too tired to look after any living thing but himself, and it'll die in a few days anyway, cut as it is—but the ring he keeps, tucking it into his breast pocket. It's only Charles' imagination acting up, but he nevertheless feels the tiny metal ring as a warm, reassuring weight against his ribcage the whole way home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was supposed to have more plot and less Charles ramble, but what can you do. Also, for the history buffs out there, there is actually a reason why life inside the Opera House is a more than a little different from what you would generally expect of the 1890's, for reasons that will be explored. I hope you enjoyed.
> 
> Edit: Thank you to gildatheplant for pointing out that Moira is not, in fact, Irish. I changed her accent to Scottish, which it should have been in the first place. *Sheepish face* Please feel free to correct any further errors like this you see, guys. I'm doing all my own editing and writing quickly, so if you think you see a mistake, you probably do.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I mention that this story is persistent? Because it is. Here's the next chapter, please enjoy.

Even though Charles doesn't believe in the phantom of the opera, he is absolutely willing to believe in the persistence of that particular myth—after all, the phantom, if rumors are to be believed, has been at the Opera longer than Charles himself.

Charles arrived at the Opera House when he was thirteen, nearly ten years ago now. Back then he'd viewed the place more as an impossible, mythical place than an actual physical building; even then it had had a reputation for being welcoming to mutants so long as they could work, which was more than nearly any other place in the world could boast. Even in France, where mutants were more visible and had more rights than they had in England, that sort of welcome was deeply unusual. The Opera had been Charles' last resort, and by the time he and Raven had actually arrived there it had been built up in his mind as a fantastic place where almost anything was possible.

To some degree, it was. For the first time in his life, Charles saw mutations displayed openly and proudly—fewer then than now, granted, but even that smaller number had been astounding to him. The Opera House was a loud, bustling sort of place, full of color and vibrant noise; in other words, the absolute antithesis of Charles' childhood home, where order and silence had been favored strongly over anything else. Charles had been overwhelmed by the place in the best possible way, and even more overwhelmed that he and Raven would be permitted to stay, through some combination of a younger Moira MacTaggert's persistence, and the pity of the compassionate director of the place, so long as they worked.

In those days, Charles soaked up every single thing about the Opera House that he could, from the thoughts of its occupants to their stories. It had been then, with no small amount of fascination, that Charles had first heard of the phantom of the opera. 

It was with no small amount of disappointment, then, that Charles had realized that the stories were predicated on superstition rather than any sort of fact. The phantom was a convenient excuse for all sorts of accidents—things that broke on set, tears in costumes, and even pulled muscles or sore throats all tended to have their blame laid at the foot of the mysterious phantom. If money went missing, well, it was clearly the phantom who had taken it, no matter that one of the dancers came to work the next day in a scarf nicer than anything she could afford. The phantom was the boogeyman of the Opera, for all that no one had ever seen him in action.

The reality of the thing was, of course, that accidents happen, especially in an Opera House, and most especially in an Opera House largely occupied by mutants. One of the dancers, Sean, had gotten into a fight with a singer once, and in his anger had nearly broken the glass chandelier of the theater and brought it all down on their heads with his mutation; the fact that he hadn't had allowed him to keep his job, but it had still been a close call. Anna Marie, another of the chorus girls who thought Raven had hung the moon, had once almost killed a dancer because her full-length gloves had slipped and allowed for skin to skin contact between them. Those cases were obvious ones, but there were hundreds of smaller accidents that occurred every day in the Opera House, and the ones that were not obviously attributed to anyone were blamed on the phantom.

Around the time Charles had become the lead dancer, stories about the phantom had died down somewhat, and Charles had been glad of it. It was better for people to take responsibility for their own mistakes, after all, rather than having some shadowy figure to blame them on.

And now the phantom of the Opera lives again. Charles supposes he should give credit to his peers for the consistency of their superstitions, at the very least.

…

Charles' next door neighbor keeps even odder hours than Charles does, which is saying something.

“Would you like help with those, Hank?” he asks, feeling amusement that's really more fond than anything else. Hank, besides being extremely polite and a fellow English expatriate, is also an extremely dedicated scientist; his great flaw is that he sometimes gets so caught up in his own research that he overwhelms himself. Today is clearly one of those times—Hank brushed past him without so much as a “hello” or “thank you” when Charles held open the main door of their building for him, the entirety of his attention focused on the journals piled in his arms. One journal is open on top of the precariously balanced stack, as though Hank couldn't wait until he got home to begin reading it. In that state, Charles is fairly certain Hank might have simply walked into the door and dropped everything had Charles not held it for him.

Hank blinks, slowly, like someone waking from a deep sleep or surfacing from underwater, and finally seems to notice Charles' existence. “What?” he asks, then seems to notice how close his precious journals are to actually toppling out of his arms and says, “Oh, yes, thank you.” Charles takes a good number of journals and helps Hank to better redistribute the rest. He can't help but notice that Hank's starting to look as though he's missing meals again, and makes a mental note to leave something out for his neighbor; Charles goes through so much food because of his dancing that he and Raven have a policy of always having extra food about the place, and Hank looks to be in need of it. 

“Thanks again,” Hank says, when the journals are settled. He looks more alert, and also more sheepish. “I just got a little caught up.”

“Oh?” Charles asks, as he turns to make his way towards the stairs, an unsubtle cue for Hank to follow. “And what is new and interesting in the science of mutation?”

“Well, it's not necessarily related to mutation,” Hank says, “but—,” he moves as though to open one of the journals, but abandons the motion when his inattention nearly makes him trip up the first stair. “I've been following the new work Henri Becquerel's been doing fairly closely, do you know of it?”

Charles has to shake his head. “No, my friend, I'm afraid that's rather above my skill level,” he says, and tries to ignore the slight pang as he does so. Perhaps in another life he would have been a scientist—the sciences had been his primary interest, when he was still being educated. In this life, he is a dancer. The closest he comes to scientific breakthroughs are the one he hears of from Hank. “What has he been researching?”

They reach their floor, and Charles holds the door for Hank once again. “Well, primarily the properties of x-rays,” Hank says, “but what he's found is completely different, something entirely new. It was actually the failure of his original experiment that allowed him to find—” 

“Hank,” Charles says, gently. “This is your door.” He gestures towards the apartment they're in front of, and Hank once again blinks.

“I'm sorry,” Hank says, “I know you have a show later this week, I really shouldn't keep you.” 

That's true, but the whirl of Hank's thoughts haven't let up, and Charles has to admit his curiosity won't let this alone if he leaves the conversation there. “Maybe the concise version?” he asks.

Hank smiles, the sort of smile that says that almost no one appreciates Hank's interests except for Charles, and says, “He discovered some sort of—natural particle decay. No one's quite sure of the implications yet, but the Curies have started to take an interest in it, and so I asked them for some relevant materials. My approach to mutation until now has been largely based on Darwin's work, and Mendel's, but I've been beginning to consider alternate possibilities to natural selection for what causes mutations to manifest the way they do. If this sort of particle decay occurs in humans too, it may account for some of the blanks in my research. Even if it doesn't, the idea is fascinating.” He fumbles the key into his door and opens it, letting Charles into his apartment as he talks. 

Hank's apartment is rather a mess, papers and research materials that should rightly be in his office at the Sorbonne instead littering his floor and most other available surfaces. Charles breathes in the dusty air and resists the urge to sneeze; for someone who does such a good job of keeping his lab space spotless, Hank does a very poor job of tidying his home. “Uh, sorry for the mess,” Hank says, flushing a little. “You can just put those down on the table, if you would.” He gestures to the journals Charles is holding. “Thank you, again, for carrying them, and—and for listening to me babble on.”

“No, I find your work fascinating,” Charles is quick to reassure him; it's only the truth, after all. He sets down the stack of journals, tracing one finger over the name on the topmost of the pile. “Sebastian Shaw,” he says, aloud, “who is he? I've never heard of him.”

“You wouldn't have,” Hank says. “He doesn't publish much—he's sort of infamous in the scientific community for dropping out of projects before they're completed. He has good ideas, but some of them have always been a little—radical, would be the best word. He's been focusing on forms of energy for the last decade or so, which is why I've got his work there. He worked with x-rays when they were discovered, and consulted with Becquerel.”

Charles makes a small considering noise at the back of his throat, and opens his mouth to ask another question, when a knock on the apartment's door interrupts him. He looks up to see Raven's blue face, and she steps fully into the room when she sees him. “Sorry to barge in,” she says to Hank, “but I was pretty sure I heard my brother in here. Dinner's ready, Charles, whenever you are.”

“Uh,” Hank says, all his articulacy of the last few minutes completely gone, and flushes red. Two things are enough to get Hank immediately flustered: negative comments on his feet, which he goes to such lengths to hide, or Raven. In the five or so years that Charles and Raven have lived in this apartment, Hank has never gotten over his shyness around Raven; Charles has been expecting Hank to ask his sister out for years, and has even been willing to let her go without protest for almost that long, but it's never happened. 

“Hank,” Charles says, capitalizing on the moment, “maybe you'd care to have dinner with us tonight? You're looking a little thin again.” 

“Um,” Hank says, again. “Sure?” He sounds anything but certain, but then again, he really does need feeding up; Charles is in no way above slight underhandedness if it keeps his friend healthy.

“Excellent,” Charles says, and smiles.

…

The next day is—well, horrendous would be a kind word. 

“Charles, could you please try to look like you're deeply in love with Angel rather than disgusted by her?” Moira asks, her tone irate. It's about the seventh time they've practiced this scene in its entirety in the last hour and a half, and Charles is beginning to be completely fed up with it. It isn't Moira's fault—they got off to a late start because of a problem with the orchestra, and then a violinist had broken her bow a few hours into the day and gone into a fit of hysterics for no reason other than being overwhelmed by exhaustion. By the time they'd sorted that out they were behind schedule, and everyone was in a poor mood. The rehearsal has not exactly been going well. That doesn't mean, though, that Moira has to take it out on him. “Alright, start again, from the top.”

He and Angel return to their starting places, and as they wait for their cue, Charles whispers, “Disgusted by you?”

Angel smiles a little and mimes a face of deep concentration, and, yes, Charles can see where his focus on a particularly complicated set of movements could have translated into disgust. He brushes his mind outwards to her, projecting affection, and she bats her eyelashes at him mockingly. 

She's not so pleased with him when he almost drops her during a lift five minutes later.

“Stop,” Moira calls from across the stage, and Charles finishes lowering Angel to the ground, whispering apologies as he does. She marches over and makes sure no one is injured, which is a bit melodramatic considering Charles hadn't actually dropped anyone, and then turns to Charles and says, “You're not here today. You haven't focused at all. Go home, sleep it off, and don't be useless when you come back tomorrow.”

Anger flares up, but Charles breathes out hard through his nose and forces it down. He knows he hasn't been performing well today, and Moira's right, he knows. Better that he leave now and come back rested than continue to delay their practices. However, understanding it objectively doesn't make it sting any less.

“Sorry,” he says, to Angel and Moira specifically, though he makes it loud enough that the other dancers will take the message too. He doesn't know what's wrong with him today, exactly. 

He's still breathing a little hard when he leaves the stage and makes his way towards his dressing room. Charles tries to focus on slowing those breaths, and then, when that fails, channels his focus into just watching the placement of his feet. He dislikes being angry, especially aimless anger like this—he knows that if he was slightly less tired or overworked, he'd be perfectly calm already. At least watching his steps gives his eyes something to do, and gives him something mindless to distract himself with.

The down side of this is being inattentive to the world around him—Charles bumps into someone on the way towards his dressing room door, and that finally jolts him out of his anger. He offers a quick apology over his shoulder to the man he walked into, and shakes his head at his own ridiculousness. He really does need to just get changed, go home, and relax; he'll do better tomorrow for it, he knows.

His dressing room door opens as he turns its knob, and Charles freezes.

He locked that door—knows he locked it, has always locked it as a matter of habit. Possessions can wander in the Opera House if a close watch isn't kept on them, but locked doors are generally respected even by the most light-fingered members of the company. Charles knows that, and consequently knows better than to leave doors unlocked, but right now his door most assuredly is.

It dawns on him like a light coming on, and Charles spins around. His dressing room is at the end of a hallway—space is too precious in this building to waste a centrally located room on just one person, even if that person is a lead dancer—and there are no rooms beyond it, no branching hallways. The man he bumped into could only have been coming from Charles' dressing room, which Charles would have noticed much sooner if his anger hadn't clouded his perspective.

Charles remembers the iris of a few days back, the thoughtful gift that turned up inside a locked room—even now he's wearing the little metal ring that came with it on a cord around his neck, and if that makes him unbearably sentimental then he'll accept that consequence. Basic logic would state that if his admirer could get inside his locked dressing room to leave that gift, and a man has just proven he can get in, chances are that Charles just physically collided with his own mysterious admirer and didn't even realize it.

The man's already gone by the time Charles turns to look for him, of course. The worst part of it is that Charles didn't notice his features at all. He knows the other man was tall, and that he was strong enough not to be knocked off balance by the collision, but he never so much as saw the man's face. He thinks, in retrospect, that he might remember some sort of cape with the hood pulled up, which would explain his complete inability to remember facial features. What it doesn't explain is why Charles failed to notice there was anything unusual about the man in the first place—even in the Opera House, a cloaked man leaving a private room is not precisely the norm. 

What Charles should do is turn around, make sure nothing is missing from his dressing room, get changed, and go home. The other man is already gone, and so his identity will have to remain a mystery for a little while longer—besides, Charles knows now that his admirer is male, which is something he didn't know this morning. He should be content with that, and go try to get some sleep like he meant to.

What Charles actually does is break into a near sprint down the hallway, moving in the direction he thinks the cloaked man was going in when he collided with him. Logically, the man probably went towards the main street entrance, but some instinct makes Charles turn in the opposite direction, towards the stairs that lead down into the cellars of the Opera House.

The cellars are not well lit, but Charles has been in them often enough to know his way around. He takes the last of the stairs and turns right—left leads towards rooms filled with old stage props and stored costumes, things which were kept in case the shows they were designed for ever play at the Opera again. To the right is a large empty room, part of which runs under the stage. This is the room that the trap doors of the stage open on to, in some of their more dramatic productions; thankfully, Charles rarely plays roles that have him making dramatic exits into the floor below, but Raven has plenty of complaints about the system.

There are noises in that room, Charles notices as he makes his way towards it. There's a scraping sound, as though something's being dragged across the floor, and muffled words Charles can't fully make out. Charles hopes—

But, no. He bursts into the room and is aware of how silly he must look a moment later, when the only people in the room are Azazel and Piotr Rasputin. They're sitting at a table playing what looks to be poker, or were until Charles rather dramatically interrupted them. “I'm terribly sorry,” Charles says, as Azazel eyes him in clear amusement. “I didn't mean to interrupt, I—” He cuts himself off there, aware that the actual reason behind his sudden appearance will sound just as ridiculous as any excuse he makes up.

“может быть, не то,” Azazel says to Piotr, and then says, “Hello to you too, Charles. Come play a round?” 

“I know better than to play cards with you,” Charles says, truthfully. He does take the extra chair at the table and sit down, though. He doesn't actually want to offend Azazel—the red-skinned, demon-tailed mutant is known to have a fondness for transporting people who irritate him into situations that are inevitably both humiliating and hard to escape from. That said, Azazel has been at the Opera much longer than Charles, and was the one who taught him how to play cards in the first place; Charles learned some lessons the hard way.

“Piotr doesn't,” Azazel points out, and his good-natured companion just shakes his head.

“One day I won't lose,” Piotr says, and then looks disgustedly at his cards and lays them down on the table. “It won't be today.”

“Persistence may be a virtue, but stupidity isn't,” Azazel says, chidingly, and lays out his own cards—a full house, which rather illustrates his point.

“Don't scare away the one person who can still stand to play with you,” Charles says, and Azazel laughs. Unlike Azazel, Piotr has a large store of patience, to the point where he's heard Azazel claiming that's the other man's mutation rather than his strength. Piotr came to the Opera about half a year ago, but he's rapidly becoming a permanent addition—between his strength in his metal-skinned form and Azazel's ability to transport, the behind-the-scenes aspects of the Opera House have been working beautifully for months. Scene changes and necessary repairs have never gone so smoothly.

“I'm sorry,” Piotr says, softly, interrupting Charles' train of thought, “but you do realize you've been speaking perfect Russian, don't you, Charles?”

Charles blinks, opening his mouth to explain, but Azazel waves a hand. “Charles is speaking Russian because he's lazy. Instead of learning new languages,” Azazel says, and his thoughts once again remind Charles that Azazel speaks six languages fluently, including one no longer spoken on Earth, “he borrows languages from the minds around his. An advantage of being a mind reader.”

“That wasn't laziness,” Charles protests. He picked up the skill when he and Raven first left England, back when Charles didn't know where they would go, where two children would be able to live safely. Learning another language wouldn't be enough—without a destination in mind, Charles would have to learn every conceivable language they might come across in order to guarantee his ability to communicate, and he knew that was impossible. As usual, it was necessity that prompted the development of his powers—stress and desperation allowed him to start 'borrowing languages' as Azazel terms it. He'd had no way of knowing, then, that the skill would somehow prohibit him from actually learning any new languages in a permanent way. Now, even nearly ten years after he and Raven settled in France, he still has to borrow the language from the minds around him in order to speak from day to day. The skill takes up more than a little energy to use, but Charles has yet to find a way to switch it off.

Still, there's no way Piotr wants to know all of that, and so Charles concedes the argument. “Effectively, it's true, though. I tend to speak whatever language the majority of minds around me are thinking in. So,” he says, and claps his hands together gently, “right now, that's perfect Russian.”

Piotr looks at him, fascination obvious on his face, and Azazel's tail flicks in irritation. “You are distracting Piotr from cards,” Azazel says, as he begins to deal another hand. “Either stay and play yourself, or go.”

Charles has had a difficult enough day already—he doesn't need to couple that with Azazel's card playing. Besides, he's a little curious to see whether his cloaked, disappearing admirer left any new gifts in his dressing room. “Goodbye, Azazel, Piotr,” he says, nodding to them both, and gets up to leave.

His telepathy filters back to French at the doorstep. “до свидания,” Azazel says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All the Russian in this chapter is credited to one of my amazing RL friends, who speaks five languages and was slightly perplexed about me suddenly asking her for translations. I take no credit; I only speak two languages. 
> 
> About Hank's science this chapter: While Hank's actual theory is a misconception, all the background science I mentioned was really happening in that time period. A French scientist discovered what Marie Curie would later term radioactivity in early 1896, so presumably this story is set somewhere into that year. I apologize for geeking out so severely, but at least part of it is important to the plot, so.
> 
> Additionally, what is described in this chapter is in no way accurate of the actual architecture of the Paris Opera, especially in 1896. If it is, it is completely by accident. I figure no one will mind overmuch, and if you do, as ever, feel free to correct me.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was supposed to be a fair bit longer and contain more plot, but I figured you guys would value a quicker update over a longer one considering that I'm going to be out of the country for two weeks. So next chapter will have more than a few character introductions, and the start of the actual plot of this story. This chapter: the show, at last. Enjoy.

'A couple of days to the show' turns all too rapidly to 'one day left before the show.' Charles is used to the way time seems horribly subjective in the week or so before a show, but this seems a little extreme even to him.

Raven, on the other hand, appears to be perfectly calm. They follow their usual routine for the day of a final rehearsal, both getting up early to eat a large breakfast. This gives them plenty of time for double checks—Charles always has a vaguely paranoid feeling, at times like these, that he is forgetting some vital piece of equipment, though he almost never is. Then, when that's done, the two of them leave together for the Opera House.

This time, though, he almost does forget something. Raven stops them right before they're out the door to say, “Charles, that necklace you've been wearing is still on the kitchen table.” Sure enough, the thin leather cord that holds the tiny ring is sitting out in the open, right where Charles put it so that he would remember to bring it along. He slips it gratefully around his neck, and feels strangely assured by its small weight. 

“At some point you'll tell me the story behind that thing,” Raven says, as they make to leave a second time. She doesn't push, though; she was curious when the ring first appeared, but after the better part of a week she's mostly given up on it. Charles locks their door and thinks briefly of his admirer, who he has seen nothing of since bumping into him some days past—most of the reason he hasn't explained things to Raven is that he has yet to figure them out himself.

“At some point,” Charles agrees, mildly. Eventually, after all, he will have his own answers.

He puts that out of mind, though. For now, all Charles needs to focus on is getting to the Opera House on time, and doing his best in rehearsal.

...

After the final rehearsal, the Opera House is suddenly teeming over with faith.

Charles isn't surprised by this. Simply because he's broken with the religion he was born to—a religion which refuses to acknowledge mutants is a little difficult for a telepath to follow seriously—doesn't mean everyone around him has. Far from it, actually: many of his coworkers have only become more devout since they began working at the Opera.

Moira, for instance, always wears a small cross around her neck—generally, though, she keeps it discreetly tucked under her collar, and pays no mind to it. Throughout the entirety of the last rehearsal, though, she wears the cross openly, and it glimmers against her neck in the stage lights. When she finally releases them from rehearsal, informing them there's nothing more to be done and wishing them all the best of luck, one of her hands goes up to toy with the necklace, and Charles knows she's going to pray for them. She always does.

She's far from the only one. The people of the Opera House are from differing cultures and backgrounds, and do not all pray to the same God—nevertheless, Charles feels the thoughts surrounding him, and for all that the names or methods of prayer may differ, the underlying feeling of faith is unchanging. Each of his coworkers wants much the same thing; they are all of them working towards the same goal, just now.

This is where Charles keeps his faith. Religion and he may not see eye to eye, but Charles has faith in the amazing people he finds himself surrounded by. They are young minds, bright minds, and each of them is focusing on the same thing—Charles has faith that they will not fail. Being surrounded by their determination, their hopefulness and their faith is an incredibly peaceful sort of feeling.

“What d'you think?” Angel says, from his side. She, much like Charles himself, edges away from religion, though her reasons are very different. That said, Charles knows full well that Angel also has her own sort of faith, in herself and what she knows her body can do on a stage. 

“I think we'll all do just fine,” Charles says, and smiles.

…

Charles used to use his telepathy to hide—to keep his mutation from being noticed by those around him if he ever slipped, and then, later, to keep Raven unnoticed and safe. Now he puts it to an opposite use.

On stage, Charles' telepathy opens him up, bares his emotions and his thoughts so that they seem to hang heavy in the air around him. The other singers and dancers respond to him on a deeper level because of it, and some degree of it filters out to the audience seated before them, until they cannot help but empathize with Charles' character. 

The opera is designed to follow two parallel stories, those of two brothers. Both fall in love, both face similar hardships, but neither story connects save through the bloodties of the main characters. Charles knows this, has spent more than enough time rehearsing to be fully aware of how the stories dance around each other—in practice, however, he puts the other story out of his mind and focuses entirely on his own. He trusts Alex and Raven to carry out their own tale of forbidden love—when he is on stage, he must see nothing but Angel. His dancing, and the character he plays through that dance, must subsume everything else.

Charles dances youth and joy once the curtain rises, and every mind within the Opera House perceives him as being younger than he is. He dances drunkenness and foolishness and the audience laughs at him. He dances wonder at his first glimpse of Angel and breath catches in the audience; he dances love to the point of near obsession, and Angel doesn't have to force the starry eyed look that is supposed to result. 

Anger, betrayal—Angel is to marry another. Renewed love and faith—she promises they will find a way to be together. Impetuousness, foolishness again but of a very different nature—he meets Sean, who boasts of his upcoming marriage to Angel, and challenges the man to a duel. Self-confidence, arrogance, passion—he meets Angel one more time before the duel, and assures her that he will triumph and ask her for her hand. The bloodrush and thrill of a fight—Sean and he dance across the stage, swords crashing together with sharp, metallic sounds. Disbelief, pain—Sean scores a hit. Fear—Sean gets the upper-hand of the fight, driving Charles backwards across the stage, and Charles can do nothing but furiously defend himself. Agony—Sean strikes a killing blow and he sinks to the stage. Tragedy—his last words to Angel, her hands gripped in his. And—silence, nothingness.

Charles is dragged limply off stage, doing his best imitation of a dead body, and stays in the wings for long enough to see Alex and Raven's romance come to a happier conclusion. Alex has the last line of the play, and it is a poignant one, with Alex's hands caught in Raven's but his eyes turned towards his dead brother's grave. He says it, and then they are done. The opening show is finished.

For a long moment, the audience is silent. Then they burst into applause, and the entire place is full of noise and raucous approval. Charles, Angel and Sean come back on stage for the applause, and not a single member of the cast looks anything but thrilled. Charles himself is sweating, more than slightly exhausted, and smiling hard enough to hurt his cheeks. He steps up and takes a bow with Angel, and the noise of the crowd doubles.

Finally, the curtain falls, and Charles watches as his coworkers all slowly come back to themselves. “Congratulations,” he says, quietly, letting the last of his character slip away from his mannerisms, and then Raven is laughing and embracing him so hard it almost hurts, and Angel is grinning at him from over Raven's shoulder.

“We did a pretty good job out there,” Alex says, and he pushes Sean off jokingly when the dancer slings an arm around his shoulder.

They all of them look flushed, and smug, and wonderfully happy; this is how Moira finds them, and she is looking almost equally pleased. “Backstage, all of you,” she says, and as they follow her Charles lets his mind open up again, this time to take in the warmth of the minds around him.

Moments like this are why Charles will never regret coming to the Opera House.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I said in the intro notes, I'm going to be out of the country on vacation for the next two weeks. Don't expect any updates during that time, as I'm fairly certain I won't have wifi. After that I hope to be back with a plot-filled chapter. See you all in two weeks. :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here I am. I know the two week absence I promised was something more like four months, and while I could make excuses for myself they would mostly be excuses. Sorry, I'll try to be more punctual with the next chapter.
> 
> That said, this chapter is a little longer than previous ones, so I hope that at least partially makes up for my absence. Enjoy!

It is a long time, that night, before Charles makes it back to his dressing room.

He shuts the door behind him, a smile still lingering on his face, and leans back against the wall of the room. It was a good show, especially for an opening night—and, like any good show, it was accompanied by a better party to celebrate. Moira got her hands on a few bottles of half-decent champagne which were split among the cast, and the warm buzz of the alcohol is still running through Charles' body. The champagne is potent enough on its on, and only more so when combined with the exertion-based rush of dancing and the pride of having done his job well: right now Charles does not quite feel he could conquer all the world if he tried, but it's a close thing.

Almost unconsciously, his hand goes up to press against his necklace through his shirt. He can't be sure his admirer saw him dance tonight, but he rather hopes the other man was there. Charles danced well tonight; he likes to be seen at his best.

A knock comes on Charles' door, from nearly right beside Charles' ear, and Charles turns to answer it. “Raven?” he calls out, as his hand goes to the handle—but he doesn't really think it's his sister. Raven was dragged off by Angel earlier, promising to meet Charles back at their apartment. She has no reason to be here now.

He's hoping—well. It's rather obvious who he's hoping will be on the other side of the door. His mysterious admirer has been driving Charles halfway out of his mind with curiosity of late. Charles has been given gifts by admirers before, but generally they've been given to him face-to-face, or at least left with a note; these tokens, left completely anonymously as they are, are more than a little odd. Charles keeps expecting the other man to step forward and reveal himself—what would be the point of the gifts otherwise?

And if his admirer is going to reveal himself, what better night than tonight? Charles is giddy on success, with champagne dancing through his body and a satisfying ache settling into his muscles; tonight seems the perfect time to introduce a little scandal into his life. 

As things stand, Charles is almost convinced that he will open the door to find his admirer, whoever he is, standing behind it. This is...not what happens.

Charles takes in the sight of the elegant, blonde-haired woman standing before his door in complete incomprehension for a moment. She looks familiar, but distantly, as though Charles knew her a long time ago or noticed her in passing. In the end, it's really the arrogant confidence of her posture and the self-assured thrum of her thoughts that allows Charles to make the connection he needs. “Emma?” he asks.

He's not sure he's right until the woman's lips quirk upwards. “I wasn't sure you'd remember me,” she says. Now that she's confirmed his guess, it's hard not to recognize her—Emma Frost as a girl was much smaller, with softer angles to her face and a gentler look to her eyes, but some things about her haven't changed at all, the quickness of her mind not the least of these things. Though there is something new there too, something shifting and aware—

Charles' eyes go wide. /You're a telepath,/ he projects to her, switching over to mental contact through reflex. He has never interacted with another telepath before. Empaths, yes, and other mutants with various mental aspects to their abilities, but telepaths as such are extremely rare in Charles' experience.

Emma doesn't react outwardly beyond a slight narrowing of her eyes, and even that's gone a moment later, but Charles feels her mind inside his own, and her thoughts give away what her face will not. She's curious, surprised, intrigued as Charles is by the sudden intrusion of a mind on her own: in other words, not nearly as blasé as her features would imply. “Well, sugar,” she says aloud, finally. “I have to say, I wasn't expecting you.”

“As if I was expecting you,” Charles says, remembering at the last moment to actually voice the words. Then, unable to quite help himself, he switches back over to mental contact. /I never knew you were a mutant./ 

/No one knows I'm a telepath./ Her expression goes slightly sardonic as she continues, /It's why my last name is still Frost, and I'm not cut off from the family money./ She doesn't outright say, unlike you, but it's implied strongly enough that she really doesn't need to. Emma and Charles played together as children, and their families were of near enough to equal standing that a match between them might have been arranged when they were grown; Emma knows full well what Charles has lost. “That would explain why the posters outside were calling you Charles Darkholme, anyway. I wondered.”

“I took my sister's last name,” Charles explains, still thrown off guard by her sudden appearance and this new revelation. “When the Xaviers informed me that they wanted nothing more to do with me, that is.” Through his surprise, a bit of common sense manages to assert itself, and Charles blurts out, “Emma, what are you doing here?” They are rather far from the Frost family estate in England, and, even if a privileged young woman attending the opera is explainable, that same young woman visiting unattended with a male dancer would raise eyebrows. 

“They call this place 'The Mutant Opera,' you know.” Emma's eyebrows go up, and a smirk crosses her lips. “It made me curious, when I first heard of it. After that it wasn't very hard to convince my father he badly wanted to chaperone a little trip.” Her mind brushes out against Charles' as she speaks: just slightly, but enough to leave no doubt of her meaning. “And here I am. No great mysteries involved, I promise.”

The odds of this meeting—especially if Emma didn't know he was here—are almost absurdly low, Charles knows. That said, Emma is standing there, looking sincere even through the arrogance of her posture; Charles does not, at present, want to question this. “It's good to see you,” Charles says, smiling. 

Emma smiles in return, the gesture slow enough that Charles thinks she might have forgotten how smiling with no ulterior motive feels. “I'm going to find an excuse to stick around Paris a little longer, give us a chance to catch up. You'll show me around if I come back, won't you, sugar?”

“Assuming your reputation won't be completely ruined by a friendship with a ballet dancer, yes, I'd love to.” Charles knows, even as he's saying it, that Emma's mutation is powerful enough that nothing harms her reputation unless she wants it to. It's only too easy, as Charles knows, to slip a memory out of someone's grasp, effectively erasing yourself from their thoughts.

Emma's smile turns sly, and her mind moves briefly in his—she heard that train of thought, then. “Then I'll see you around, Charles. There's someone I should be talking to right now.” A face flashes across her mind. The man in the image is middle-aged but aging well, with dark hair; Charles gets the strong impression of interest, but none of it feels romantic. /Interest in his work, not his body,/ Emma projects to him. /Considering how hard he was staring at you tonight, sugar, I think interest in his body would be a waste./

For a second, Charles feels the ring of his necklace against his neck, warmer than his skin temperature alone should be able to explain, and wonders whether the man in Emma's thoughts is his admirer. But no, her thoughts are already supplying him with information to the contrary: the man is a scientist, who has been in Germany for some time and only arrived in Paris yesterday. Charles' admirer has been in the Opera for at least a few months now, though he's had concrete evidence of his admirer's existence for less time than that. /Who is that man?/ Charles projects.

/His name is Sebastian Shaw./ Emma must either see or feel him startle, as she continues, /Heard of him?/

/Only a little,/ Charles admits.

/Well. You'll probably meet him sooner or later. He doesn't seem the type to take no for an answer when he wants something./ Emma smirks, and the tone of her thoughts is impossible to miss. /Fortunately for me, neither am I. And right now I want a word with him./ It's not quite a dismissal, but neither is it a polite farewell. Some things about Emma Frost, it seems, will never change.

Charles just shakes his head, expression fonder than he means it to be, and says, “Go, my friend. We both know that you want to.”

She doesn't protest, just nods and turns to go. “You'll be seeing me,” she says, over her shoulder, as she moves away from him. Halfway down the corridor that leads away from his dressing room, she pauses, and turns back to face him. “And, Charles?” she says, looking pointedly at the place where the metal ring of his necklace rests against his skin. “Shaw wasn't the only one watching you tonight.” That warning, from Emma, is as good as her telling him to be careful; she doesn't bother to actually say it, but the intent is there. 

Charles finds, as she finishes walking away, that he is smiling, and cannot quite make himself stop.

…

Emma, of course, probably didn't realize exactly what her words gave Charles. She has never lived in an opera house, or anywhere even remotely similar to one; she has no way of knowing what she's done.

“Kitty!” Charles says, louder than he means to. It's enough to carry his voice down the hall, to make the young singer stop and spin about to face him. He steps forward quickly, closing the distance between them; it's too early in the morning to be shouting down hallways, especially the morning after a show. 

“Prof,” Kitty says, mild confusion obvious on her face. “Do you need something?” Her voice sounds a little rough this morning, the natural result of singing for such a prolonged period of time, but not unduly so. Charles can be a—well, a bit of a worrywart over the younger members of the Opera House. It's good to see Kitty looking well.

Charles so rarely makes requests of those he works with that he feels only a little guilty in saying, “Yes, actually.” There's really no delicate way to go about this—and even if there was, Kitty's retelling of the thing will make it scandalous regardless—so Charles just says it. “There was someone watching me at the show last night.”

Kitty's expression brightens visibly at the admission, and Charles would be able to tell her mind was racing even if he wasn't a telepath. In the first five seconds alone, Kitty imagines and discards a hundred possibilities: a beautiful woman, a dangerous enemy from Charles' past, a beautiful man, a former lover, Charles' illegitimate child, and the list goes on. Her imagination is equal parts inspiring, amusing and vaguely terrifying, especially when Charles himself is the subject of it.

“A man,” Charles says, in the hopes that clarification will turn her thoughts onto a less creative path. Unfortunately, this just seems to open up new avenues of thought, and— “Really, Kitty,” Charles can't help but say, “I may be a dancer, but even so, I don't think I'm flexible enough to do that.”

Kitty's thoughts tinge with faint embarrassment, but her expression is unrepentant. “Sorry, Prof,” she says, lightly, and makes a point of moving her mind away from anything sexual. “Is he someone you know?”

“Someone I'd like to,” Charles says, a little cautiously.

He might as well have said Christmas was coming early; Kitty smiles wider than he's ever seen her do before. “So let me get this straight. There was a mysterious man in the audience last night, and you want me to find out who he is?” Charles nods—Kitty nods slightly in return and continues, still smiling, “I can do that, Professor. I can absolutely do that.” 

“I'd be extremely grateful if you did.” This is one of the great things about the Opera House—it's functions very much like any other network of information does. Regardless of the size of the Opera House, regardless of the constant hubbub and activity, there will always be someone who notices something out of place, and once one person has seen it's only a matter of time before everyone else knows too. Kitty is deeply tied into the network of gossip and shared secrets in this place; if anyone saw Charles' admirer last night, and someone most likely did, then Kitty will be able to find that person. 

“You'll be meeting your mystery man very soon, Professor,” Kitty promises. A smile still on her face, and her thoughts racing, Kitty waves an idle goodbye to him, and promptly phases through the wall of the hallway they're standing in. Generally speaking Kitty deigns to use doors with the rest of them; it's only when she's very excited that she uses her mutation this way. That's probably a good sign, Charles thinks—if Kitty is this motivated by the intrigue of the thing, maybe he will be meeting his admirer sooner than expected.

Then again, by lunch time the whole Opera will be buzzing with the news of Charles' torrid affair—for all that he has yet to meet the man, he's betting the rumor mill will have him in a star-crossed romance by dinner.

Charles smiles a little, and shakes his head. It's just one of the many oddities of working in an Opera House.

 

…

It likely says something about how busy Charles has been of late that he completely forgets he promised Ororo language lessons until she actually appears at his dressing room door and asks after them.

Charles simply looks at her for a moment, disconcerted by his own forgetfulness, and stays silent long enough for Ororo to start frowning. “That is—you did say the Wednesday after the show, didn't you?” Already her thoughts are coloring with resigned disappointment, as though she is so used to being turned away that she isn't even surprised by Charles' apparent refusal to help. 

Before those thoughts, Charles was considering turning her away, admittedly, if solely for one day; it won't do her much good to learn from him if he has nothing planned to teach her. He cannot, however, turn her away in good conscience while her thoughts feel like that. Better for her to have a scattered first lesson than to feel rejected by the first adult she's asked for help in years.

“Yes, I did,” Charles says, and summons up a smile from somewhere. “Come in, please, Ororo, and make yourself comfortable. I was just trying to remember where I left the slate I usually use for writing lessons; forgive me if it seemed like my mind wandered.” Some of the tension in the girl's posture bleeds away at that, and she steps inside the room, looking around a little curiously as she does so. Private dressing rooms are only afforded to the lead dancers; small as this room might be, it is never the less a status symbol for Charles to have it, and Ororo has no doubt never seen the inside of one before. Her curiosity makes Charles smile—he remembers being a young dancer, much like her, and being similarly fascinated with the privileges of the lead dancers.

That's quite enough reminiscing, though, Charles reminds himself, and goes to fetch the slate from where it sits propped up on a small table. A small drawer in the side of the table holds slate pencils, and Charles withdraws one carefully. Ororo by this time has taken a seat in the only chair in the room—the one facing Charles' mirror—and Charles moves to stand beside her before offering her the slate and pencil. “I thought we could start with your letters,” Charles says, improvising. “If you would write out the letters that you know on that slate, I'll teach you the ones you don't know.”

“I don't know very many,” Ororo says, looking up at his face as if to gauge his reaction to that.

Charles simply shrugs. “That's what these lessons are for, to teach you. I just want an idea of where to start.” Ororo looks at him, looks at the slate, and hesitates. Curious as to the reason for this sudden hesitance, Charles dips into her thoughts, just a little. The surface of her mind is full of memories of the first job she ever took—an extra set of hands for a poor baker who barely paid her—and memories of being punished for errors. 

Anger flares briefly in Charles; he can't stand people who do harm to any children, let alone bright ones like Ororo. He makes himself calm, though. Anger is the last thing Ororo needs just now. With that in mind, Charles says, “Every student I've ever taught has come to me knowing very little, Ororo. You might actually be better prepared than most of them, since you know any letters at all.” That reassures her, as he meant it to, but doesn't start her writing. “Besides,” Charles says, and smiles warmly at her, “I was a terrible student, when I was much younger. It took me a long time to learn my letters, and longer to be good at them. So I know how to be patient, with these things.” He doesn't mention, of course, that his parents had him start learning to write when he was three, with hands too small to hold a pencil properly—that isn't the point of the anecdote. The point is to show Ororo that he's no less fallible than she is, and to put her on ease so that he can teach her.

In that respect, it does its job. Ororo's eyes widen, and she says, “Really?”

“Yes,” Charles says. “That'll be our secret, alright?” He says that last with a large smile so Ororo will know he's teasing, and the girl responds with a nod and a few giggles. It does Charles good to see Ororo—who he can already tell tends towards quiet seriousness—laugh like the child she is.

“Thank you,” Ororo says, and then she says, “I know the letter 'O'.”

“Show me,” Charles says, and at last she puts her pencil to the slate and does.

 

…

Two days later, Charles is feeling much less satisfied with himself. This is almost entirely due to the fact that Kitty has finally returned to him, bearing news about his admirer; that news being, unfortunately, that there is no news at all.

“Sorry, Prof,” Kitty says, looking positively crestfallen. “It's like your mystery man just vanished into then air after the show.”

Charles shakes his head, smiling to dispel the young singer's disappointment. It isn't as though she's really brought back bad news—all she's telling Charles is that the status quo will remain as it was, with Charles' admirer looking on in secret and Charles left merely to hope that the man will reveal himself. Kitty was not his only hope, just his only hope of being proactive. There's always the chance that his admirer will simply step forward on of these days. “That's quite alright, Kitty,” Charles says. “You tried your best, and that is all I asked of you.”

“Sorry,” Kitty says again. Then, because she's not the type to let herself wallow in negative emotions, Kitty visibly tries to find the bright side of the situation, and looks far more cheerful when she does. “It's not like I found out nothing, though, Prof. I figured out what box he was in when he watched the show.” The convoluted chain of people she had to ask to find out even that much flashes through Kitty's thoughts, much to Charles' amusement. When there's something Kitty wants to know, she could give the Inquisitors of the Spanish Inquisition a run for their money. “There's still one more show tomorrow night. Maybe if he comes to closing night you can find him afterward?”

If it were that simple, Charles would have found the man weeks ago. It's possible his admirer will come to their closing night, true, but Charles highly suspects that even if the man does, he'll be long gone by the time Charles is free to look for him. He actually might admire the man's skill at not being found, were it not running exactly counter to Charles' own wishes. 

Kitty has worked very hard, though, and if Charles' admirer was any other man then her plan might even be viable. “Thank you, Kitty,” he says, “you might be right.” 

Kitty all but beams at the praise, and says, “It's nothing, Professor.”

“No, really,” Charles says, “your help has been invaluable. Thank you.”

Kitty nods, and, lingering in his door frame, says, “I really hope you find your mystery man, Prof.” Then she turns and all but dances off, humming as she goes.

Charles has to smile at her exuberance. Turning away from the door, he goes to finish unlacing his shoes—people in this Opera House seem to have a knack for interrupting him when he is in the middle of removing some part of his clothing—and finds himself humming the same tune Kitty was. It's a bar of music from the opera they're performing, a song he's heard Raven sing at least a hundred times. Charles' voice is nowhere as good as his sister's, but he can at least hum on key and remember his sister singing it; the tune is a catchy one.

When he hears footsteps at his doorway, his first assumption is that Kitty has returned for some reason. “Did you forget something, Kitty?” he asks, and turns to face the door.

From his door frame, Azazel says, “идиот.” 

Charles feels the equivalent of a mental pull, and knows that was his telepathy transitioning into Russian, borrowing the language from Azazel's thoughts. “Sorry,” Charles says, “say that again?”

“I called you an idiot,” Azazel says, and Charles feels his expression draw tight in confusion. As far as he knows he's done nothing to deserve that—but then, this is Azazel, so trying to explain his confusion is useless. Either Azazel is already planning to explain the insult, in which case he will, or he isn't planning to, in which case Charles is probably going to find himself teleported to somewhere uncomfortable, like the middle of a lake or the bedroom of a government official. Asking for clarification won't do anything but make the awkward teleportation possibility more likely. “Both of you,” Azazel says, either ignorant of Charles' confusion or just uncaring. “Idiots.”

“Both of whom?” Charles asks, before he can stop himself.

Azazel simply glares at Charles, tail lashing at the air behind him in a clearly exasperated motion. “Exactly,” Azazel says, like that explains anything. “A pair of idiots. Him running around with all this absurd mooning, like some teenaged boy looking in a girl's window rather than a grown man.” Azazel cannot mean what Charles thinks he does with those words—but, when Charles opens his mouth to ask, Azazel talks right over him. “And you, the dancing professor who thinks himself so smart, never asking how a man could disappear in thin air and appear in impossible places. As if this is so impossible in an Opera House with a teleporter.”

“What?” Charles asks, a little weakly.

Azazel ignores him, and points one red finger very close to Charles' face. “So I have decided I am done with idiocy. Done with carrying him about here and there and having him never say a word, done with you ignoring the obvious. This ends today.”

“What?” Charles asks, again, feeling idiotic for the repetition.

He might as well have said nothing, though; a moment later Azazel has reached out to grab him, hard, by the lapels of his jacket, and then his dressing room is gone a moment later and Charles is spinning sickeningly through nothing.

It isn't the first time Azazel has teleported him, nor is it even the first time Azazel has teleported him without warning, but Charles has never quite become accustomed to the momentary feeling of not truly existing anywhere. It is reassuring to become solid again a moment later and feel ground beneath his feet.

It's less reassuring, of course, for that solid ground to be almost impossible to see through the sheer darkness of—wherever they are.

“Azazel!” Charles says, just about ready to demand an actual explanation, but then the teleporter has let go of him, and Charles cannot find the man in the dark. “Tell me what's going on,” Charles says, his tone firm. 

“I already have,” Azazel says, and then, “There's a light that way, Charles. Follow that. Talk to him like adults.”

“What?” Charles begins to ask, for the third time. Halfway through the word, however, a sound like a pop of air reaches Charles' ears, and a faint wind rustles Charles' hair. Azazel is gone.

This leaves Charles in the dark, with no idea of where he is beyond what Azazel's irritated ramblings have provided. And, also, inconveniently enough, wearing only one shoe, as the other is sitting in his dressing room.

“Wonderful,” Charles says, unable to hold back a slightly nervous laugh. He stands still to let his eyes adjust to the dark, the stone floor of wherever he is cold against his bare foot, and eventually he can actually see a light in the distance. He has no idea what that light means, of course.

Still, his other option is standing around in the dark until he dies of thirst in a week or so, which makes the light ahead a far more appealing option than it would have been otherwise.

“Wonderful,” Charles says, again, shaking his head. Then, carefully, he sets off toward the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As ever, I am writing all of this with only myself as beta, so if you catch any errors please feel free to shout them out. Also, the Russian in this chapter was provided by google translate, not my Russian speaking friend, so it's entirely possible I used the wrong word entirely. If so, tell me and I'll correct that. I like to get feedback from readers when I make mistakes; it helps me learn.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember how I promised you lovely readers a more punctual next chapter? Right. Here you are. Enjoy.

When Charles' telepathy first manifested, it was like he'd opened his eyes after years of living with them shut, with everything that entailed. Suddenly his world was much wider than it had been before, and the people around him were a thousand times more colorful; yet in a way it was nearly blinding, metaphorically speaking, to suddenly have access to so many details he had never before noticed. 

The learning curve required for Charles to survive the first weeks was nearly astronomical, given that he had to adjust completely in secret for fearing of being discovered as a mutant. He learned, very quickly, that he couldn't say anything out loud in reference to people's thoughts—that alone was harder than it looked, considering that at first it was difficult for Charles to even distinguish between what people were thinking and what they were saying aloud. A few suspicious looks taught him that quickly enough, though, and he managed to keep himself from being discovered.

Then there were added difficulties: how to stop hearing everything everyone thought, as that gave him dreadful headaches and confused him; how to cope with the fact that people were apparently far more complex and more twisted than he thought, sometimes in truly horrifying ways; how to reconcile what he'd been taught his entire life, that he and his family were somehow better than others because of their wealth and position in society, with the fact that they really, truly were not.

In fact, some of the most vibrant minds Charles ever encountered in the Xavier estate were those of the servants, and that was one of the greatest shocks Charles ever received. Before his telepathy, he had been aware of the servants only peripherally. He knew, of course, that someone had to make his meals, and warm the water for his baths, and keep the fireplaces of the house tended to; but, as his parents had always been of the opinion that servants were meant to be seen only in the quality of their work, Charles hadn't ever had to really interact with the servants of the household.

When his telepathy came on, suddenly Charles wasn't able to remain that oblivious. The rooms underneath in the servant's floor—the kitchens, the laundry room—which had previously seemed so remote to Charles were suddenly places he could not ignore, full of bustling life and thought as they were. Ninety percent of the minds in his household belonged to servants, to people thinking of their everyday tasks and their own homes and their own families, to people with thoughts and ideas and dreams all of their own. Charles had never before had to consider servants as people.

In retrospect, Charles knows he's fortunate his telepathy manifested when it did. Had the ability come later, Charles might have been too set in his ways to rethink the way he approached people, and that would have harmed him deeply later on. If he'd come to the Opera House still entrenched in class differences and false superiority, who knows what his life would be like now. 

However fortunate he knows himself to be in hindsight, that doesn't change the fact that at the time, that realization shook Charles deeply. It is never easy, to suddenly realize you've been living above something strange and complex and beautiful and never known it.

…

That moment, Charles thinks, was more than a little like this one.

The light is not just a light, of course. Charles realized that by the time he was halfway to what had at first appeared to be a singular light, when the light began to separate into two distinct light sources, and then a third, all of them high above Charles' head. The strange thing was that they were the wrong color of light for lanterns—too white, and all of them equally bright rather in a way that candles rarely achieved. 

Charles, though, was not expecting this.

Stretching above the cavern he appears to be in are electrical lights, three connected rows of several lightbulbs illuminating more brightly than a lantern ever could. Charles knew electricity could be used to power lights, of course, and he'd seen models of Thomas Edison's lightbulb—still, no one he knew was wealthy enough to use electricity as a power source within their homes, preferring to rely on the far more economically viable candles that had been in use for centuries.

Yet here, below the Paris Opera, there is undeniably an excavated space lit by nothing besides electrical light. Charles had made a truly embarrassing noise when he first figured that out, and had spent at least the last fifteen minutes trying to figure out what was powering them. Perhaps trying to find an exit to this place would be a better use of his time, but Charles sees no need to leave just yet. This is fascinating.

He doesn't realize he's said that last out loud until it echoes back at him, oddly loudly, from the surrounding walls. He jumps at the sound of his own voice—he wasn't exactly expecting to hear any human voices down here—but settles before the echoes have completely dissipated. So long as there isn't anyone down here to disturb, it hardly mat—

A low, smooth man's voice hisses, “Qui est là?” and Charles' heart actually skips a beat from fright.

It's hard to tell, at first, where the voice came from; the echoes do a lot to hide the origin of a sound down here. Charles looks, nevertheless, whipping his head about to try to catch some glimpse of who on earth would be down here. A moment later the sound of heavy footsteps reverberates through the cavern, and Charles remembers that he's a telepath and can just find the mind of the man behind this, that's there's nothing to fear.

He stretches out his senses and finds—nothing. No human minds at all within his range.

When a man steps into the light not fifteen feet away, Charles finds himself honestly terrified because he cannot feel the man's thoughts. It's as if there's some blank, mindless homunculus standing before him and not a man at all; Charles has never before found a mind he could not touch.

Clearly the man does have thoughts, though, because he visibly recoils at the sight of Charles. “Vous ne devriez pas être ici,” the man says, and something in his tone almost sounds hurt or maybe upset. Charles is a little preoccupied with realizing that he cannot understand the man—without a mind to borrow languages from, Charles is right back to only understanding English.

Wishing he'd tried a little harder to break that telepathic habit, Charles tries to find any French words his mind has actually retained. It's harder even than Charles expects it to be. “Je suis,” he starts, and then it is a struggle to find the next word, “desolé, Monsieur. Mais je ne—je n'ai—.” Charles gives up, irritated beyond belief that he cannot even speak the language he has been using for almost a decade. “Parlez-vous anglais?” he asks, trying to find a wry smile for the other man that he suspects falls flat. “I'm sorry,” he continues, in English, “I'm terrible at French. And I'm sorry for intruding, it's just that—”

“You shouldn't be here,” the other man interrupts, in perfect, if accented, English. The accent makes his words seem sharper—German, if Charles had to guess. It's likely an extremely inappropriate time to realize that accent is also extremely attractive; but, then, Charles knows better than almost anyone else just how strange the human brain can be. “You need to go back to the Opera House.”

“Ah,” Charles says, “I would, but there's a slight catch.” He pauses, just to see if the other man is about to cut him off again, and then continues when the other man says nothing, “I have no idea where we are, and I can't go back the way I came. My skills in teleportation are a little lacking.”

“Azazel,” the other man says, closing his eyes. “Fils de pute, je le tuerai.” Charles doesn't need to understand the words to understand the sentiment there; Azazel has either just had his ancestry insulted, or possibly his sex life. Either way, the words are undoubtedly curses. That cursing continues for another moment, still incomprehensibly where Charles is concerned, and then other man breathes out once, heavily, and closes his eyes.

Charles takes the opportunity to look at the man. Firstly, because it's just occurred to him that the man is wearing a metal helmet that covers his entire head and parts of his face—and it says quite a lot that Charles was so distracted by his inability to read the man that he completely disregarded that visual oddity until just now. And secondly, because Charles, whatever Azazel accuses him of, is an intelligent man. He had time, during his walk, to fully process what Azazel was saying to him before the man abducted him and left him here. He understands that the man standing in front of him is the admirer he's been wanting to meet for weeks now. 

The other man is, in fact, extremely handsome. Provided the helmet is disregarded, his face is rather lovely, all sharp lines that are only interrupted by the hint of stubble at his jaw and his frankly transfixing eyes. The other man is tall, too, significantly taller than Charles, with strong shoulders. Unfortunately, he's wearing a cloak that covers almost all the rest of his body, so Charles' assessment ends at the shoulders. Still. His admirer is apparently one of the most handsome men Charles has ever seen. If Charles could only feel his mind, he'd be able to say with assurance that the man is actually perfect.

Charles isn't quite done with his ogling when the other man opens his eyes again. “Alright,” he says, as though he's come to a decision. “I'll take you back to the Opera House, and we'll forget this ever happened.” The other man turns away from Charles, clearly intending for Charles to follow him, but pauses when he's walked several steps and Charles hasn't moved. “Come on,” he says, over his shoulder, frowning.

Charles hesitates. “Look,” he says, “Azazel wanted us to talk. I get the feeling that if we don't actually do as he says, we'll just repeat this whole process over again.” That's true, but it isn't the entire truth. Charles wants to know this man, has wanted to know him for quite some time now. If he can't read the other man's thoughts to gain that knowledge, then that leaves him with words.

The other man turns around, quickly enough that the movement seems angry. “And what do you want to talk about?” he asks, his tone suddenly gone smooth in a way that seems almost threatening. “Mm? Would you like to talk about the freak living underneath the Opera House? What do you want—stories to laugh at later? Or would you like an apology, for me daring to think I could leave behind tokens of admiration as though it could possibly be returned? Is that it? What do you want from me?”

The tirade leaves Charles momentarily wordless with surprise. What on earth could drive a man to immediately assume that what Charles most wanted was to taunt him, or laugh at him? 

The other man seems to take Charles' silence as some sort of agreement, though, because he shakes his head and begins to turn back around. “I'm a fool,” he says, quietly enough that Charles thinks the other man didn't mean for Charles to hear him. “You need to leave now.”

Charles won't allow this to end before it begins. “You asked me what I want,” he says, and steps closer to the other man, “but you never let me answer.” He reaches out a hand to the other man's shoulder, meaning to turn him around to face Charles, and is extremely surprised when the other man all but flinches under the touch and spins to face Charles like he's expecting an attack. Charles puts up his hands immediately, palms visible to the other man, signifying peace; and the knotted feeling that was beginning to form in his stomach intensifies. What on earth happened to this man?

The other man laughs, and it is not a happy sound. “So what do you want?” he asks, as though he knows the answer already and will not like it.

“Well,” Charles says, keeping his voice soft, “telling me your name would be a good start.”

Now that Charles knows to look for it, he can actually see the moment where the other man dissects that request, suspicion flitting briefly across that beautiful face as the other man tries to decipher any harm that could come to him from such an innocent request. Apparently he doesn't find any, as he says, warily, “My name is Erik.” It doesn't escape Charles' notice that the other man avoids giving him a last name.

So Charles responds in kind, “And mine is Charles.”

“Charles,” the other man—Erik—repeats, softly, almost reverently. Charles has to breathe in hard to push away the warm curl of arousal at hearing his name said like that. If Charles could have what he wants, here, he would ask Erik to say his name again, to never stop saying his name.

But he cannot have what he wants. Erik expressed admiration towards him, and though Charles' admiration has taken a sexual tone, that doesn't mean Erik's has. Even if that was what Erik meant, Erik himself is still a man living below the Opera who Charles doesn't truly know, one who's clearly been deeply harmed before if he's so suspicious now. On top of that all is the fact that Charles cannot reach Erik's mind. Simply falling into bed with the man—the easy, physical relationship Charles was expecting when he realized he had an admirer—is clearly not a possibility.

Still, Charles wants to know this man. “Erik,” he says in return, and watches Erik's eyelids flutter shut in evident pleasure as Charles says his name. “I'm pleased to meet you.”

The simple pleasure on Erik's face disappears at that last, and Erik opens his eyes. “You won't feel that way for long,” Erik says, with the air of someone stating a fact rather than an opinion. “Still, thank you for the thought.”

“I think I can decide for myself how I feel about you, Erik,” Charles says, uncertain of whether he's more amused or irritated at the presumption.

“Of course you can,” Erik says, looking at Charles as though he's just said something very strange. “I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I just meant that your feelings are likely to change after our—talk.” For all the bitterness Erik puts into the word 'talk,' you'd think it had insulted his mother; Charles opens his mouth to say something to this affect, and is interrupted once again by Erik. “If we must talk,” Erik says, his tone suddenly gone flat and nearly emotionless, “can we at least do it somewhere comfortable?”

That, at least, makes sense to Charles. “Of course,” he says. “I take it you have somewhere in mind?”

Erik nods. “Follow me,” he says, and turns once again to go back the way he came.

Still a little uncertain of what he's getting himself into, Charles does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter will not be up tomorrow, but it may be up before this Saturday. If it isn't, then probably some time next week, since I have to move back into my dorm and start up classes starting this weekend.


End file.
